


every part of your body rubs against the bricks [on a blood buzz]

by postcardmystery



Series: infinite london [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:32:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His shoes are on the tube, the Piccadilly line, somewhere, and Watson’s t-shirt is in a skip in Camden and his heart is all over London, fractured, everywhere, except that it isn’t, it’s the kitchen drawer in Baker Street, with the forks and the knives and their guns and the postcards he sent to Watson from the third, the fourth, the fifth times he was sectioned, and his heart belongs to London but to Sherlock Holmes London is just a man, a man with a gun and a smile and a mystery he can never solve, and London is just a man and Sherlock Holmes is just a man but John Watson, John Watson is a whole city and you can never get bored of London, Sherlock Holmes knows it well.</p><p>A contemporary AU of the Ritchie!verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every part of your body rubs against the bricks [on a blood buzz]

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for blood, violence, mental health issues (bipolar disorder), self-harm and suicide.

 

_London has more railway stations than other European city, so many, in fact, that it is often said that the only man who knows them all is Sherlock Holmes._

  _London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained._

Dr. Watson,  _A Study in Scarlet_ , Arthur Conan Doyle

  _Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens._

John Berger

  
  
  
  
  
_The heart of the city, it’s its heart, dark and beating and flooded_ , he tells him, at night, when he can’t sleep, and sometimes when he can,  _it’s the city’s heart, and this city is mine, even when it’s sleeping, even when I am_ , and Watson smiles, says, “Is that why they kicked you off the tube again? Honestly, mate, do you never learn?”  
  
  
  
  
He rides the tube because he can’t  _not_ , half-mad with the noise and the press of the people, all of London around him, dirty and clean and frightened and bold and his, all his, and when it gets too much he presses the headphones into his ears, loses himself in the scratch of the violin, his eyes pressed shut, feet on the seats, and he rides the tube until the tube stops running, until it’s him in an empty compartment and a transport officer with the expression she’s worn the past five times and he’s still not tired, because Doctor Johnson,  _because_.  
  
  
  
  
“Lestrade says if you get arrested again he’s going to send you a safety pin and an invoice for the damage you did to his car,” says Watson, and Holmes snorts, indignant, says, “I did  _not_  get arrested. I was escorted out of Holborn tube station, and I was very polite about it, too.”  
  
“Traditionally,” says Watson, sighing, “the person who is being escorted out of a train station by the British Transport Police is not the one who has to be polite. Or at least, the time for politeness, as it were, has passed.”  
  
“Oh, Watson,” says Holmes, leaning against Watson’s leg, “you are such a stickler for the sodding social conventions, aren’t you?”  
  
“One of us has to be,” says Watson, amused despite himself, “can you remember where you left your shoes, oh genius-lord-of-all?”  
  
  
  
  
It's hot, under the city, where the trains rattle, so hot, and Holmes knows without even blinking why Shelley said that if Hell was a city, it was a city just like London, grey and cold and hot and white, marble and stone and pigeon shit, but Hell is not a city, Hell is silent and neat, and there are no mysteries, everything lined up in tidy little rows, and London is many, many things, but it is never tidy, and neither is Sherlock Holmes.  
  
  
  
  
“I need you to come and get me,” says Holmes, the phone dangling near his ear, and Watson says, “Is that a euphemism for ‘I need an ambulance’? Can you just tell me if it is, I don’t want to waste the time.”  
  
“Shut up,” says Holmes, “I know exactly where I am, I’ve already texted you the address, just call a taxi and stop being so obstinate-“  
  
“ _Me_?” says Watson, his voice high, “Me being obstinate? Oh, Christ, Holmes, the text came through, a skip,  _again_ , how the hell do you keep doing that, how do you even get in--“  
  
“I’m wearing your t-shirt,” says Holmes, and hangs up.  
  
  
  
  
There’s lye in the carpet and blood on the ceiling and the kitchen is blackened beyond repair, and they’ve fucked on the carpet and in the kitchen and they would fuck on the ceiling, too, if they could, and Holmes’ hair is easy to fist in Watson’s fingers, always messy, often dirty, rarely brushed, and they could make it solid, legal, and they never do, because it’s just for them and the walls of their squalid flat in Baker Street and nothing, nowhere, no-one else.  
  
  
  
  
“She’s dead,” Holmes tells the girl’s parents, before Watson can stop him.  
  
The father’s face crumples, the mother just says, “How--“  
  
“No one can lose that much blood and live,” says Holmes, “I wasn’t required here, Watson could have told you that.”  
  
The mother starts to cry, and Holmes’ face twists, he says, “I thought it would be kinder--“  
  
Watson claps his hand over his mouth, pulls him away, says, “What have we talked about, about you being  _kind_?”  
  
  
  
  
Holmes is skinny, skinny and sore-looking, like if he elbowed you wrong the bone would come out through his skin, there are always bruises under his eyes and his hair is wild, and he’s probably twenty-five but in the right light he can look nineteen or thirty-five, in his rumpled Prada suit and the hoody he stole from Watson, wearing Doc Marten boots with dirt on his face and a light in his eyes that makes people look away, except that it’s already too late, because you looked at all, and that’s all he needed.  
  
  
  
  
“You’re as bad as he is,” says Lestrade, mud on his boots and his trousers, and Watson, mud all over, says, distracted, “Why is that, again?”  
  
“That’s a dead fuckin’ body, son,” says Lestrade, “most blokes can wait to get in there until a month of Sundays comes, if you know what I mean.”  
  
“No,” says Watson, as he tweezes something out of the corpse’s nostril, “I really don’t, Inspector.”  
  
“Don’t listen to him,” says Holmes, his legs crossed, soil on his face and in his hair, “dead bodies are a perfectly legitimate interest.”  
  
“All right, Count Dracula, Doctor van Helsing,” says Lestrade, rolling his eyes, “I’ll leave you to it, come on, boys, you know how they like their space, come on--“  
  
“There’s nothing wrong with you, you know,” says Holmes, his hand meeting Watson’s, on the dead man’s torso, and Watson smiles, says, “There is, but that doesn’t mean I’d change it.”  
  
  
  
  
Watson doesn’t register at first, not when you first glance at him, good-looking, tall, or tall next to Holmes, but you’re looking at Holmes because everyone is always looking at Holmes, his hands windmilling, dark sunglasses on, talking a mile a minute, and it’s not until later that Watson registers, his clothes dark and streamlined, like he’s going to march into battle at any moment, and he is, he will, and the danger there is omnipresent and blinding, but only once you see, only once you look, and no one ever does, they see that weirdo of a pathologist and nothing else, but Watson wouldn’t have it any other way, even if Holmes would, and, well.  
  
  
  
  
He leans into him as the tube shakes beneath them, Bond Street, a stop away from home, and he says, “You always make this better.”  
  
Watson frowns, says, “You love the tube, you daft sod.”  
  
Holmes looks up at him, and his eyes are wide, says, “No, I don’t.”  
  
“You--” starts Watson, but then they’re at Baker Street, the doors are sliding open, and Holmes’ hand is in his, pulling, and lost in the people of London there is no more time for questions.  
  
  
  
  
This week he is a chemist, this week is a hacker, this week he is a tech developer, an artist, a musician, a poet, a photographer, a drug addict, a mental health outpatient, and only sometimes, ( _always_ ), a detective, because Sherlock Holmes is so many things that he sees no reason to only pick one, except Watson’s, and that, as he is so quick to tell, was never a choice at all.  
  
  
  
  
“Your brother sent you another letter,” says Watson, and Holmes, his face torn between smiling and exasperation, says, fondly, “How can you tell?”  
  
“No stamp,” says Watson, and Holmes presses the letter to his chest, his back to Watson, and closes his eyes, breathes in and in and in.  
  
“I know what you’re doing, you know,” says Watson, eyebrow rising above the  _Guardian_ , and Holmes, still not turning around, says, “I doubt that very much, old boy. Want to go shag in the British Museum again?”  
  
“Oh,” says Watson, dry, “you are a romantic,” but that’s a  _yes_ , always, always,  _yes_.  
  
  
  
  
His shoes are on the tube, the Piccadilly line, somewhere, and Watson’s t-shirt is in a skip in Camden and his heart is all over London, fractured, everywhere, except that it isn’t, it’s the kitchen drawer in Baker Street, with the forks and the knives and their guns and the postcards he sent to Watson from the third, the fourth, the fifth times he was sectioned, and his heart belongs to London but to Sherlock Holmes London is just a man, a man with a gun and a smile and a mystery he can never solve, and London is just a man and Sherlock Holmes is just a man but John Watson, John Watson is a whole city and you can never get bored of London, Sherlock Holmes knows it well.  
  
  
  
  
  
"Your finger's broken," says Watson, and Holmes snatches his hand away, says, "Nonsense, s'fine."  
  
Watson raises his eyebrow, says, "A bus drove over it, Holmes. Either it's broken or I'm handing you over to the CIA because you're an  _alien_."  
  
Holmes sniffs, says, "Mycroft would never allow it."  
  
Watson laughs, says, "I bet he would, just to teach you a lesson."  
  
"What lessons," says Holmes, his eyelids only fluttering for a second when Watson tapes his fingers together, "could I possibly have left to learn?"  
  
"Do  _you_  think it's charming that you think that?" says Watson, ripping the edge of the tape, "Because  _I_  don't. How about, oh, I don't know, 'don't lie under a bendy-bus', for a bloody  _start_?"  
  
"Nope," says Holmes, grinning, and Watson sighs, and twists his fingers into Holmes' hair, just a little too tight.  
  
"My sexual magnetism wins the day again, I see," says Holmes, and Watson says, "Yeah, you'll be of great use to me with a mangled hand."  
  
Holmes licks his lips, and, well, he never was much of a one for boundaries.   
  
  
  
  
Holmes fixates on places, places that have no interest for anyone else, a week on Finsbury Park tube station, two on a  _Pret A Manger_  in King's Cross, five days on a park in Russell Square, three terrible, harrowing days in Brixton, endless weeks on the South Bank, in the snow, wind whipping through his hair, in nothing but a pair of Watson's too-big jeans and a stained t-shirt, a ripped tweed jacket and fingerless gloves, just watching, drinking it in, because he's addicted to London and all that London is, but he always comes back to Baker Street, to their flat with peeling paint on the walls and drugs under the floorboards, because London is London everywhere, but Watson, Watson is the king of their little kingdom, with its dirty carpet and ragged curtains, and Holmes would rather reign in Hell, but this isn't Hell, so he doesn't, he doesn't and he never will, so long as Watson is in the same armchair every morning, his hair wet from the shower, and this can't be Hell, and Holmes used to wonder, but Watson smiles, he smiles every day, and Holmes doesn't wonder anymore.  
  
  
  
  
"This isn't like the other times," says Holmes, and Watson says, quietly, "I think it is. Exactly like them, in fact."  
  
"I stopped because I don't need them," says Holmes, "look, my hands don't shake anymore."  
  
He's slumped against Watson's leg, his hand held out, and Watson says, kind, "That's because all of you is shaking, Holmes."  
  
"John," says Holmes, "John, I--"  
  
"I'm calling Mycroft," says Watson, "and he will call the doctor, and you will  _go_."  
  
Holmes look at him, then, and Watson sees everything he needs to see, presses a button, and says, "It's happened again, Mycroft, yes, mania, not, not  _that_ \--"  
  
  
  
  
It's cold in London in winter, always colder than the tourists expect, bundled up in layers on the streets outside, but never on the street where they live, graffiti on the walls and the smell of gunpowder in their flat, and he loves it, loves the cold, because London never stops teeming, even when there's snow, because it lives as much as he does and it doesn't stop for anything, not even for him, and he steals Watson's clothes and slips out before Watson wakes up, walks to Scotland Yard until he thinks his feet are bleeding, snow in his hair, his clothes soaked through, and it feels like a limb is missing, without Watson beside him, but his face was pink and warm and Holmes had to struggle to leave him, and when Holmes can't get up for any reason, he has to because he  _must_  or he never will again, so he left him there, murmuring in sleep, and he walks until his ankles are bruised and it only feels wrong when he thinks about it, or when he doesn't.  
  
  
  
  
"Not like that," says Irene, and she doesn't mean it, or she does, or both. If anyone can do both, it's Irene Adler.  
  
"I don't trust you, darling," says Holmes, and she smiles, with her lips made of lies, and says, "I should hope not, beautiful."  
  
  
  
  
There's twenty kinds of pills in their bathroom cabinet, lithium, klonopin, and more besides, and he knows their names and chemical make-up as well as Watson does, and there are other pills, too, beneath their floorboards, pills of dubious legality and even more dubious assistance to his fragile mental state, and he can still hear the first doctor's voice, the one who made his mother cry, and he was branded in that moment, branded into difference, a scar on his soul he could never shake off, and it's been all people have seen for years, all save Mycroft, but there was a man battling his own demons, a man who needed perfectly calm seas or drowns, and he came to London with the clothes on his back and a bottle full of pills, and he expected to die there, driven by things under his skin only he can feel, clawing to get out, but then he met John Watson, the man who saves him from the monsters, saves, not saved, because Sherlock Holmes needs saving all the time, and John Watson was his first chance, not his second, but he's Sherlock Holmes, and a first chance is all he ever needed.  
  
  
  
  
"I hope you know what you're doing," says Mycroft Holmes, his feet on their filthy coffee table, and Sherlock Holmes sniffs, says, "What sort of question is that?"  
  
"A wise one," says Mycroft Holmes, red socks bright against the grime, "you've always been an addict, little brother."  
  
"I don't dispute it," says Sherlock Holmes, sitting on the floor, his head resting on the sofa beside his brother's thigh, "but better this, eh?"  
  
"Better  _him_ , you mean," says Mycroft Holmes, and his brother smiles, and that's answer enough.  
  
  
  
  
Watson fucks like he moves, sharp and lethal, with admirable restraint that Holmes can't even pretend to emulate, doesn't want to master, holds Holmes down and fucks into him with long, hard strokes, leaves bruises on his hips that another man would cover up and Holmes doesn't, wears too-small t-shirts, presses his fingers into them on the tube, and it itches under his skin every time, the fact that Watson is his, that he is Watson's, and he might disappear for nights and days and nights but the bruises remain, etched on his skin, out for everyone to see, the cartography of Sherlock Holmes' heart, laid bare, and it's just flesh, but, but, except for how there is no such thing as  _but_.  
  
  
  
  
There's a drip in his arm and a band around his wrist, and he's been under sectioning for twenty-seven days, another day, he knows, and he can go home, and Watson's voice is on the other end of the phone, "Have you been eating your meals?"  
  
"It's remarkable," says Holmes, "they have their means. So, yes, I suppose."  
  
"I think I'm going to have to pick up tips," says Watson, even though they both know that it won't work, that Holmes has a cannula in his arm, and he'll have a cannula in his arm again, some day, and Holmes says, a whisper, "It's still noisy, John."  
  
"I know," says Watson, his voice warm, "but it's less noisy, isn't it?"  
  
Holmes can't say  _yes_ , and he can't say  _no_ , so he says, instead, "I love you," because that, at least, is always true.  
  
  
  
  
If John Watson is a city, all the city Sherlock Holmes will ever need, the Irene Adler is  _the_  city, London's edge in her smile, unpredictable and beautiful for it, gold over her skin and russet in her hair, and her accent might not be London, but  _she_  is, all the breathtaking dangerous dirt of it, and Sherlock Holmes doesn't love her, but he doesn't  _not_  love her, either, he loves her the way he loves the city, up close but at a distance, too alien, too  _big_ , to touch, and she smiles at him and kisses his forehead and leaves with her diamonds, but she's there, still, her step on the pavements, because she's as much a part of the city as he is, bound together in squares and churches and the smog that's long gone but whose memory remains, and Irene Adler is mythology, just like Sherlock Holmes, and he doesn't love her, but there's power there, and he doesn't usually respect power, but for her, he does, because she isn't his and she never will be, but she's London, and London is power beyond even the desperate, cunning reaches of Sherlock Holmes.  
  
  
  
  
  
"Let me go down on you," says Holmes, his head against Watson's leg, and Watson says, "If you eat your dinner, we'll see."  
  
Holmes tilts his head back, a wicked grin on his face, and opens his mouth, and Watson hastily says, "If the next words out of your mouth are 'my dinner is right here', I am throwing out all your Asimov paperbacks."  
  
"No," says Holmes, running his hand up Watson's inseam, "you aren't."  
  
Holmes' clever fingers close around Watson's cock, and Watson, his face flushing, says, "Well, all right. Not this time."  
  
  
  
  
There are scars on his arms, his own train-tracks, thick, ugly lines, the tracks a razor left, already white and healed by the time he met Watson, by the time they found Baker Street, because Holmes had been sectioned for six months and needed somewhere, anywhere, to live, and Watson was penniless and desperate, and he knew the first time he met Holmes what the signs meant, and Holmes kept his arms covered up and himself to himself and he didn't touch Watson for six months, but he still  _knew_ , and even if he hadn't, Mycroft came over one grey afternoon, and there were both photographs and threats and Watson needed neither, needed nothing but a razor to never touch Holmes' arms again, and Holmes failed in his attempt, to escape, he had, except for how he knows he didn't, because fate is fate and Watson touched them in the end, the messy, raised lines, his skin Braille beneath Watson's fingers, and Watson had already read him anyway, and he can't hate them, even if he should, because there are no 'if's any more, just John and his careful hands, and he's scarred, but he's grateful, too, and he's scarred in other places, other places he still can't hate, because it's John's name and he'd carve it in his soul if he could, ( _he has_ ), but all he has are the jagged reminders of a forgotten triumph, and they will have to do.  
  
  
  
  
They're holding hands at a crime scene, the blood spatter on the walls and the smell of death in the air, and Watson says, "If I--"  
  
"Never," says Holmes, lifting Watson's wrist to his mouth, his breath warm and his lips cold, and Watson, his eyes burning, says, "To the ends of the earth."  
  
"Yes, my love," says Holmes, "I know."  
  
  
  
  
He sleeps and he doesn't, hours in their bed in Baker Street, Watson curled around him, holding him there, the nails in his feet, even in sleep, three days on a park bench, newspaper for blankets and no shoes, maybe he was never wearing them at all, slumped in a store cupboard in Scotland Yard, chalk on the walls and his arms on his knees and his head on his arms, waking up at Victoria, at Covent Garden, at Camden Town, and he'd worry about theft if he had anything worth stealing, but all he has is the city and Watson, ( _same difference_ ),  and he sits on their coffee table, equations on his arms, ink in his hair, no food for two days and no sleep for four, because the answer is out there if he can just  _look_ , and sleep, no matter what Watson says, is not where he finds his answers, because all he sees in sleep is Watson's face, and there's a mystery he already knows, in his bones, in his blood, that he is never going to solve, and he can't, he wouldn't, because that's the point, and, well.  
  
  
  
  
"Move up a bit," says Watson, his hands fisted in the back of Holmes' t-shirt, of his  _own_  t-shirt, because God knows Holmes can't keep his hands to himself, not even in that one respect, and it's all he's wearing, Watson's t-shirt and carpet burn on his knees, and Watson can count all of his ribs,  _one two three_ , so he digs his fingers in, feels the bone, inside Holmes to the hilt on the floor of their flat, and Holmes says, " _Please_ \--"  
  
Watson pulls himself up and pulls Holmes up with him, until they're both on their knees and Holmes will have new teeth marks to not hide at the Yard in the morning, but he all he says is, " _Harder_."  
  
Watson obeys, Holmes' blood on his teeth, running down the back of his throat, and they're inside each other, and he knows, he  _knows_  that's why Holmes begged, why he always does, so he obeys, the way  _he_  always does, this endless cycle, and he's never wanted anything else.  
  
  
  
  
The station at Baker Street is shabby and run-down, this is not somewhere tourists ever go, nothing around where Holmes and Watson live and work and fuck but takeaways and drug deals, and Holmes leans with his head on the cracked tiles, his hand in Watson's back pocket, and wonders, because he is ephemeral but mythology is forever and there is an echo here, an echo only he can feel, an echo of something more than rat's piss and Londoners with darting eyes, something that lurks under the cracks in the walls and it's so close, just a little push, but the rumble of a train is coming, Watson's hand around his wrist, and Sherlock Holmes is just a man and London is eternal, it would be so easy, but the doors are sliding open and it's slipping through his fingers, through the cracks, and.  
  
  
  
  
"Mrs Hudon," says Holmes, flinging the door open, and she doesn't look impressed, but then she never has, and she says, "Still up to your amateur dramatics, Mr Holmes?"  
  
Holmes steps back to let her in, and says, "My dramatics are many things, madam, but they are rarely  _amateur_."  
  
"Hello, dear," she says to Watson, "still tagging around after this lunatic, are you?"  
  
"Someone has to save London from him," says Watson, and Mrs Hudson laughs, says, "Save  _him_  from London, more like. You got my rent, Mr Holmes?"  
  
"Yes," says Holmes, jostling at a floorboard, "and you didn't get this here, you were never here, we've never met and I don't want to know where it goes or why, and don't get it wet, there is a tendency for it to, hmm, how to put this, rather--"  
  
"It explodes," says Watson, cutting him off, "so don't take it in the shower with you, like muggins over here, or you'll get a nasty shock."  
  
"He is neglecting to mention," says Holmes, fishing out a bag full of white powder, "that I was not alone in the shower at the time."  
  
"It was murder on my PTSD, if that's what you mean," says Watson, and Holmes, shamefaced, says, "Well, yes, that's very true."  
  
"I don't want to hear about your shower antics, do I?" says Mrs Hudson, but there's a smile on her face, anyway, a soft smile on a hard face, and Holmes grins back, so Watson does, an easy mimicry as simple as breathing, and she says, still smiling, "Oh, there you are, boys. Aren't you handsome?"  
  
"Yes," says Holmes, but he's looking at Watson, his eyebrow raised in play but his eyes tell a multitude of little sins, and, well, it's the little ones that matter.  
  
  
  
  
Mycroft Holmes is nothing like his brother, or so people say, grey-streaked hair on a well-built frame, a smile like the calm at the eye of the storm, but his brother knows better, because Mycroft is clean and smart and well put-together, because he  _must_  be, because the Holmes brothers know the value of a good disguise, the smile that hides the eyes where darkness lurks, the gentle hand that holds the knife that's already in your back, you just haven't noticed yet, Mycroft is a storm because they both are, it's in the blood and in the minds they share, that are so almost but not quite one, and he knows his brother and it's the calm façade that makes him deadly, because if Sherlock Holmes is a thunderstorm then Mycroft Holmes is a hurricane, and hurricanes are wild and beautiful and transcendental elemental danger, but they also can't be tamed.  
  
  
  
  
"We can't get caught in their toilets again," says Watson, and Holmes smiles, says, "It's the British Museum. I know how you feel about the Reading Room, don't lie."  
  
Watson smiles, wryly, but he still has his trousers round his ankles ten minutes later, Holmes' mouth around his cock, and he's reminded again for the thousandth, hundred-thousandth time, how futile it is, to think that you can lie to Sherlock Holmes, even with a smile.  
  
  
  
  
It's the places that are abandoned that he loves best, he haunts Aldwych more than its ghost, the ghost he's never seen, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, and if he saw her he would follow her, follow the stamp of her feet down into the depths, because Sherlock Holmes has already been there and there's nothing left for him to fear, and he sits on the stairs at Brompton Road, as the water drips down the walls, stares at the place where the body was found at the bottom of the lift shaft, and it was a mystery then but it's not a mystery now, because there are many mysteries in Sherlock Holmes' head but London isn't one of them, lying on the filthy floor of British Museum Station, his phone dead and his feet wet, waiting for a train that's never going to come, but he'd get on it if it did, because London is a heart,  _his_  heart, and it will kill him one day, a single bullet to the chest that he's wanted all his life, his own finger on the trigger and Watson's hand in his, and it's just a matter of time, it always was.  
  
  
  
  
"You boys be good," says Lestrade, whisky on his breath, and Holmes cries, "Never!"  
  
They're outside a pub in Deptford, it's pissing it down, and Watson says, "He's only trying to help, you know."  
  
"No," says Holmes, "he's encouraging us to go home and shag each other's brains out. Toodle-pip, old boy."  
  
"Did you just say, oh, God, you  _are_  drunk-" says Watson, but then his back is against an alley wall, rainwater in his hair, and as Holmes grinds against his leg words cease to have any meaning, as, when Holmes is involved, they often do.  
  
  
  
  
London is his heart, but it isn't, the lines of the tube are his arteries and veins, but there's scar tissue on Watson's shoulder, a map Holmes can never quite learn, and London is his heart, he says it all the time, but John Watson is London and he's a map all his own, stitches over shrapnel that mark the beats of the heart of Sherlock Holmes, because his heart isn't his heart at all, and it's not its beats he depends on, but John Watson is his city and his mirror and his scars, and Watson is cartography itself, a map Holmes can never get quite right, and his tongue traces the lines in the dark, and he thanks a God he doesn't believe in for IEDs and morphine and honourable discharges, because Sherlock Holmes is just a man but John Watson is a hero, and there's no such thing as heroes, just the heart of Sherlock Holmes, but in the end, it's much the same.


End file.
